


Love like a cannonball

by amaresu



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: A softer world - Freeform, Community: thefandomzoo, Episode: s02e04 Salvage, F/M, No Dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-24
Updated: 2012-05-24
Packaged: 2017-11-05 22:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/411841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaresu/pseuds/amaresu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I love you the way a knife loves a heart, a bomb loves a crowd, the way your mother warned you about, essentially." - <a href="http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=709">A Softer World #709</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Set the world on fire

Before she knew he was a clone and she just thought he was a plant who took his role very seriously, she'd taken to teasing him. He was cute and passionate and so very easy to rile up at times. After she finds out she feels sick. She's never really taken any sort of ethical stance on cloning, but something in her stomach twists and she knows deep inside that what Cadmus and the Light did was wrong. Wrong in the way she wants no part of, which is the real reason she first starts helping him out.

She never stopped flirting with him, but somehow on their crazy quest to find someone who probably doesn't exist anymore he starts flirting back. She agreed on the no killing rule and much to her own surprise sticks with it, even when there's no way for him to find out if she doesn't. Somehow it works. They break beds and walls and dozens of Cadmus labs, but they never find what he's looking for, what she's supposed to be looking for. Only she thinks she found it somewhere inbetween the anonymous hotel rooms and back alley information deals. She found Roy.

Not the Roy that he wants her to find though. They fall into marriage the same way they fall into bed, and with the same disregard for structural stability as everything else they do. He buys her new sai sheaths instead of a ring and she gets him a quiver. They sign the marriage license in some back water town in the middle of nowhere with only the office secretary for a witness. Their hotel is firebombed just minutes after they leave town, but the city hall is fine so the marriage goes through.

She's never been so painfully happy. It's a startling realization that she'd burn the world down for Roy. Even more startling when she looks at the line of over-the-counter pregnancy tests and realizes she'd leave Roy for this baby. This unexpected and unplanned, but already loved, baby. She's never known love to be easy thing though so she doesn't balk at doing what she needs to do. She cleans up, packs up, and leaves with a note saying _It's been fun Lover, but a cat needs to wander_ knowing it's cruel, but unable to help herself.

She doesn't burn the world down, but she does burn down a few buildings with a few people inside them. She hunts down everyone who's ever owed her a favor and twists until they spill their guts. She even goes back to Gotham and all it takes is one cup of tea and her mother is calling in all of her old markers. She may have been out of the game, but everyone knows what the old Huntress did to Sportsmaster last time he showed up. If nothing else the cops still tell stories about coming into the apartment to find Robin laughing himself sick in the window as the escaped prisoner lay screaming on the floor from his busted kneecaps, Paula Crock holding her frying pan and screaming in Vietnamese at the man. No one dares to claim they don't remember who Huntress was and what she did for them.

Together they piece a tapestry of maybes and possibles and follow one thread to an almost positive. By the time her beautiful baby girl is born they have a solid lead. One last chance to find the original Roy. She'll give him this one last chance to put his demons to rest and become the father she knows he can be. The father their daughter needs.

Seeing him looking down at Lian she knows she made the right choices. She'd burn down the world for Roy Harper, but all it takes is that look of wonder in his eyes to know that they'd both burn down the entire fucking universe for that little girl.


	2. Give it all up

The first time she shows up during the search he fires every arrow in his quiver at her, refusing to listen to anything she has to say. It's only after he's chased her off that he finds the slip of paper, pinned to the wall with one of his arrows. The information isn't much, half of it stuff he already knows and the other half stuff he can't afford to trust, but it makes him think. The information pans out once he's able to collaborate it with other sources and so the next time she shows up he holds the arrows and lets her talk. 

Two months later when he finally has to admit to Ollie who his new partner is, it no longer feels weird to wake up next to her. He never really thought about love accept to vaguely wonder if he'd ever find something half as good as what Ollie and Dinah have; but he thinks Jade could be everything he'd ever wanted. Instead of his life spinning around a single axis in his ever consuming search for the real Roy Harper, he finds it spinning around her too. He doesn't look to closely at why he drags her down to city hall the same day Jim tells him that he's going to stop searching, he just knows that he wants Jade in his life. He just knows that he can't imagine her not being in his life.

It's only later, after she finally leaves him, that he acknowledges the fact that he wanted to stop her from doing just that. Sometimes she would hint at giving up the search, telling him all the reasons he is Roy Harper, and he worried that one day she'd make him choose. He's honestly not sure which way he'd would've gone, the only thing he does know is that either way he'd have regretted it. There's a bitter feeling of relief when she makes the choice for him. He doesn't have to imagine life without her because now he knows just how empty it is without her at his back. 

He keeps her note and doesn't look for her, even though he hears about her anyway. Snips and rumors that he does his best to ignore. He knows he's spiraling downwards now that Jade is gone, knows he's no longer spinning so much as crashing. In his darker moments he wonders if Jade had been right, maybe he could be the real Roy Harper, but he knows that he can't steal someone else's life. Even if he wasn't the one doing the stealing originally. He can't take this life for himself anymore than he could take it for her, no matter how much he wants it.

Seeing Lian Nguyen Harper on her mother's back makes the world break apart and shatter. Holding her in his arms pieces it back together. He knows in that moment that he could take this life for her. He could give up the search for his beautiful baby girl. He'd give up Speedy for Lian and never look back.


End file.
